NORTHERN

Northern Telephone Cooperative provides basic and advanced telecommunications services and broadband Internet access to 1,100+ homes and businesses whose locations are spread across more than 3,200 square miles in north central Montana.  The map on this page shows the location of Northern’s six exchanges relative to the state of Montana.

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Northern's construction crews are actively implementing the company’s 4-year plan to extend Fiber-To-The-Home (FTTH) to each of Northern’s remaining rural customer locations.   When the rural areas are completed, the focus will then turn to the towns of Kevin and Sunburst.  Northern is extending FTTH first to customers in rural areas who are currently served with bandwidth-constraining long copper lines.  Bandwidth is much less constrained by the short copper lines in the towns.

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The goal of Northern Telephone’s aggressive fiber buildout is to ensure that everyone who lives and works within the company’s vast service area can reap the many social, educational, health care, entertainment and economic opportunities available on the Internet in this new information age.

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OUR HISTORY

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Back in the early 1950s, local community leaders recognized that without taking matters into their own hands, the area now served by Northern Telephone Cooperative would be left without phone service.  Due to demographic and other factors commercial phone companies found this area uneconomic to serve. 

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Those community leaders rolled up their sleeves and formed Northern Telephone in 1952, and the company became a cooperative in 1954.  The leaders that created Northern Telephone Cooperative hired engineers, construction workers, and technicians and built a telephone network that today serves customers across more than 3,000 square miles of north central Montana.

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Now, more than 60 years later, despite the revolutionary changes in technology that have occurred, without Northern Telephone, those who live and work in this beautiful, but sparsely populated area would still have little or no telephone service, or access to the ever-growing list of valuable on-line Internet services.